Becoming a multisite church is a great way to impact more communities with the good news of Jesus. Is your church ready to go multisite?

0:19 Lee Stephenson introduces listeners to the episode topic.

1:44 Danny Parmelee talks about how he was initially anti-multisite and how he came to see it differently.

2:33 Danny discusses how his church ended up choosing to do multisiting and church planting at the same time.

4:25 Danny says the key indicator when deciding to go multisite is if you will be able to reach more people for Christ by doing it.

5:08 Danny says his church was committed to a one-message model — the same speaker during the weekend at all locations.

6:23 Danny talks about the logistical challenges of having three locations.

7:08 Lee asks Danny if he had someone to drive him to the locations or if he drove himself.

8:27 Lee asks Danny what he would do differently now.

9:47 Lee shares two questions to consider when thinking about multisiting.

10:38 When people say they’re taking the best of both worlds of planting and multisiting, they actually often take the worst of both and put them together.

11:37 When considering church planting or multisiting, it’s important to think through the process of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

12:28 Lee talks about the hybrid model of church planting and multisiting that his church in Central Florida uses.

15:01 Danny points out that the unreached people you’re trying to reach are not impressed that you’re multisite. Don’t do it because you want to look good when you show up at a conference or within your network or denomination. Ask, "How are we going to reach more people for Christ? What’s the most effective way?"

16:00 Lee finishes by encouraging people to play to their gifts. "If you’re not an apostolic leader, multisite may not be the way to go. But if you’re an apostolic leader, it’s OK to embrace that and lead accordingly."

Lee Stephenson: Welcome, everyone, to the Unfiltered podcast. This is Lee Stephenson, executive director of church planting for Converge.

Danny Parmelee: I’m Danny Parmelee. And I oversee church planting for Converge MidAmerica and Southeast.

Lee Stephenson: And we’re excited for our conversation. Today we’re talking about another level of multiplication. In our conversation, we’re going to talk a little bit about multisiting. And there are different formulas for multisites. They’re hybrids that have been developed, I’d say over the last 10-15 years. And where you’re seeing it done differently based on context, city, urban, rural, some people are going to a video venue only, some people go live teaching, some people are going it’s more of a family of churches. So there are a lot of different layers when it comes to multisite. But I do think it is a usable strategy when it comes to reaching more people for Jesus. And so part of our conversation is more not necessarily on the methodology, like, hey, just do this video, for instance. But is when you realize in your church, that you are at a place where you’re actually ready to multisite depending on whatever methodology that you’re going to choose to do that. So Danny, I mean, when you were in your urban context, church planter in Milwaukee, by the time you left the church, you had three different sites that were running, why don’t you give us just a quick overview of the three different sites and the methodology behind that? And then we’ll talk a little bit about what were the triggers that you were looking for along the way, too.

Lee Stephenson: If you didn’t want to do like eight services.

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, I mean, it starts to have a diminishing return of how you can do that. So, yeah, didn’t really want to do eight services. We thought about church planting, like, do we just, you know, send out, you know, 30 people and, you know, create some room for a couple months, or whatever type of thing. And what happened is we ended up choosing to do multisite and church planting at the same time parallel, like, literally, one weekend, brought in the church planter and said, Whoever wants to go with the church planter, they’re planting autonomous churches a little bit further suburb out, and we had some good families go with them. And we said, we also are putting a plan in place to be able to do multisite. So instead of just one or the other, and I’m just a huge advocate now of both planting and multisite. But that the church needs to think through why they’re doing which one and the context, the circumstances, there are, instead of saying this one’s right, this one’s wrong, or this one’s better. This one’s not as good. It to me totally depends on circumstances that I have seen. More churches make mistakes because they see other people doing it, because it worked for them to do just do it or because it’s the cool thing, and especially ones like we are two churches, or you know, one church in two locations was like the slogan that everyone wanted to put on their website. And it’s just like makes me puke sometimes, because I’m like, why are you doing? So I think when you asked about the key indicator is are you able to reach more people for Christ by doing whatever it is fill in the blank. So don’t think, Well, we’re not growing now. We’re not reaching people for Christ now, but if we go multisite, then all sudden we will because you’re basically just going to multiply whatever you have. So if you are a plateaued church, or you are declining church and you just choose to go to multsite, that’s what you’re going to multiply. You’re going to multiply a decline or you’re gonna multiply a plateau. So the key thing is: Are you in a healthy place? You are reaching people for Christ, you are discipling people. If you are, then that could be one of the options of how to do it. So for us, we were very committed to a one message model. In other words, there is one speaker on the weekend. And the reason that we chose that is because it was so our message was so tied to our small group structure. So what we said is, it didn’t matter which location, which service or which small group you went to, you’re getting really the same content. Now, we actually did do a blend of video and live, but it was still one speaker. So I’ll fast forward to when you have three, when we have three different locations. There’s one pastor who is preaching, and driving around to different locations, and wherever they’re not is a video, but it’s still the same message that is being done. The other reason why that was so important to us is instead of having three people working on the same sermon, it’s just one person is putting in all the time to do that, where the other pastoral staff and campus pastors are able to work on leadership and discipleship instead of three to four people all doing it. So I’m not even saying that’s the only way to do it, but for us, that’s how we chose to do it.

Lee Stephenson: So even when you’re three, you would visit all three locations on that weekend and speak live.

Danny Parmelee: Yes. So, um, yeah. And it was, it got crazy. And we were down to literally minutes. And I mean, there was walkie-talkies. And you know, you know, people do, I mean, it did get logistics, logistics were challenging. And, you know, we eventually we were running fiber and high quality video and everything. So, and just learned a lot. Now, one of our biggest lessons that we learned is, that it’s actually really not good to have both live and video at a location. Because if people have the option, they’re going to choose live. So it gives an unequal weight where we just would have started, but we painted ourselves into a corner that we kind of couldn’t get ourselves out of. And there were some other dynamics that were, you know, involved with that.

Lee Stephenson: OK, so did you have a driver? Like when you’re speaking that would actually drive you to locations? Or do you drive yourself?

Danny Parmelee: So let me also say, we grew into a teaching team, which was really the most amazing thing and had phenomenal communicators. So what that allowed is really solid teaching, we would even work together on a lot of the prep stuff, because we would preach throough books of the Bible. So in the summer, we would spend a lot of time all kind of doing that no matter who was actually preaching the sermon. And then, so I was down to about probably 50% of the time, even by the time that I left. We tried to do the driver thing. It made more anxiety for me to have a driver. So I switched back. Some other people chose to have a driver, they like to have a driver. For me, I wanted to just get in the car, be in control. Get there, if I didn’t get there, it was my fault. I didn’t have to talk to anybody. I didn’t have to, you know, so I chose not to have. I tried it for a while, a couple weeks, to have a driver. Someone said that literally was because of the way that we had, because I think we had five different services, literally, someone had the car started ready for me to literally walk out the backstage of whichever location I was at to move into the next one.

Lee Stephenson: What would you do different now, knowing the experience and all that kind of stuff? Or would you just keep it exactly the same format and methodology that you did before?

Danny Parmelee: Yeah, definitely different for us. And by the way, we continued to plant at the same time that we did multisite. So for us, it was a matter of figuring out for this community. And if God gave us a planter, they planted. If God gives a campus pastor, then we did a campus. So we made those decisions again, based literally on the circumstances and what was working for us in our structure and who we had kind of at the time. From a logistical standpoint, we I would now not do what we did with the whole live and video. It would be have a push site, that literally all of your live is here, and video and everything else will get pushed to that site for video so that it’s not about the driving back and forth but of the trying to communicate to culture of live versus video and just all the confusion that comes with that when instead saying, this is what we’re gonna do, and we’re gonna have the campus, you know, pastor that if that campus pastor is preaching, they’re preaching at the live site, and that the video’s getting pumped there.

Lee Stephenson: I would echo for those that are out there kind of maybe playing around with the idea of you know, should we multisite? Is this a workable strategy? I would highly encourage you like, work from a place of health. If there are holes in your health, when it comes to your team, when it comes to the culture, when it comes to your finances, you’re probably not ready. And the second question in my mind is, do we have a culture that’s worth replicating? If you’re sitting there and go, I don’t know if we really do like, then church plant, like send church planters out because they’ll generate a new culture and that new culture may actually fit best in that context. If you’re saying, Our culture, what we have going here is healthy, and it’s good, and it would work there, then multisite might be your avenue to actually reach that community.

Danny Parmelee: I think one of my biggest pet peeves that I have heard lately is people saying, well, we’re taking the best of both worlds of planting and of multisite. But what they often tend to do is they take the worst of both and put it together. And they’re doing multisite because they get to put their name on it because other people are doing multisite, but they take the words, and so they actually divide. And that’s where I’ve heard people say, well, we’re multisite, but we’ve got two live preachers with two different cultures with two, you know, and so it’s like, well, that doesn’t make any sense, what you’re describing would be able to be done better, you’d be more effective if that was just a plant, or the reverse, where it’s like someone saying, well, we don’t really, you know, want to plant or we don’t want to multisite we’re gonna plant. However, you have all of these resources, you’ve got this great branding, this great culture, that by borrowing or using that platform, you would actually reach more people for Christ by doing multisite than you would by planting. And other times you’d reach more people for Christ by actually planting and, again, not that it has to even be one because I do think there is that spectrum, but of thinking through the process of why you’re doing what you’re doing. And not just, Well, I don’t believe in using video or I don’t believe in there’s like think through then, well, then, are you saying that it’s the brand or the name because then maybe it is actually multisite? And just go for it? And do it. So anyways, you’ll get me heated on this. So at Harvest right now, you are essentially multisite even from the beginning because you kind of have two, so you have the Hispanic congregation, but then you guys are also looking to do.

Lee Stephenson: We’re launching another one this coming fall. Yeah, we kind of probably did what you said don’t do so.

Danny Parmelee: What, the best of both worlds? Well, you can, there are some best of both worlds.

Lee Stephenson: I feel like from our experience and what we’ve seen just being a student of the game for a long season and time and kind of going, hey, we’re kind of building a hybrid model is kind of what I say. But yeah, we are launching congregations is really the term we’re using. It is a Harvest congregation, but there’ll be live preaching. And so it’ll be the same message, the same passage, the same series, the discipleship process, the discipleship strategy, are all the same pathway, same children’s ministry, you know, have the same feel. And so we’re looking at replicating the culture, but with a level of what I would dub 75% autonomy. So there’s autonomy to contextualize things to the local congregation as necessary. Knowing like, the way I preach in this community may need to look a little bit different just to have the same impact in this community. And being in Central Florida, that’s definitely the case. Because you can go 30 minutes down the road and have a completely different culture. And so we’re trying to play to the strengths of what’s going on in that community and not just assume everything that we do and how we do it, will do it. But there’s centralized services, so all the marketing, all the brand awareness, all the accounting, those things will all be handled from a central standpoint. So that way, basically, like each congregation that we plant, we’re basically providing them with a business administrator and an executive pastor. So that way the lead planter can really play to their strengths and not feel like they have to do all these other things. They can be a team builder, they can preach, they can motivate the crowd, build the culture, do those things. We’re going to take care of all the rest for you. And so we’ll launch the next congregation in October and then we’re already got game playing on the next three kind of locations that we’re looking at. And so if any of our listeners are out there want to be part of the Harvest family and interested in planting one of those congregations, just give us a holler at harvestflorida.org.

Danny Parmelee: That does not mean quit your church plant that you’re doing right now. So I think one of the things that you know, and this goes back to even motive and motivation, the unreached that you’re trying to reach or that you’re saying you’re trying to reach are not impressed that you’re multisite. They don’t get it. They don’t care if you’re doing it because you want to look good when you show up at a conference or within your network or denomination. You might because like, yeah, we’re multisite, we are two churches in one location. Don’t do it for that reason. Think, how are we going to reach more people for Christ? What’s the most effective way? And then like you said, the spectrum there is you figure that out for yourself, because there’s not one way and yes, you can learn from other people and learn from mistakes, but try to just answer that question the most strategically that you can for your specific context and leadership.

Lee Stephenson: Absolutely. And then play to your gifts. Like if you’re not an apostolic leader, multisite may not be the way to go. But if you’re an apostolic leader, it’s OK to embrace that and to lead accordingly. Well, fun conversation. Multisite is definitely another strategy to reach more people for Jesus. It’s not going to go away. It’s going to continue to grow. It’s going to continue to morph. We’re going to continue to see multiple iterations of how this plays out. I think the biggest thing for our listeners, like be courageous, try some new things. Do what you need to do in order to reach more people for Jesus. Thanks for tuning in. This is the Unfiltered podcast. Until next time, keep it real.